Evolution of Interpreting Studies

Evolution and State of the Art

• Interpreting studies have two main sources:
  • Insights gained by practitioners reflecting on their craft
  • Work done from the vantage point of other disciplines, predominantly psychology
• Research on interpreting has been sourced predominantly by psychology, unlike written translation which owes much of its formative input to linguistics and literary studies
• The skill of simultaneous listening and speaking, considered impossible according to psychological theories of the day, spurred experimental psychologists in the 1960s to study this unique cognitive feat
• Focus on issues such as the time lag between input and output (also referred to as ‘ear–voice span’) and on the effect of various input conditions (e.g. speed, noise, text type)

Academic Foundations

• In the 1960s, several personalities with a professional background in interpreting worked towards establishing the study of interpreting (and translation) as a subject in academia
• Otto Kade, a teacher of Czech and Russian and a self-taught conference interpreter, was a pioneer in the German-speaking area
• Seleskovitch played a pioneering role both in the profession (more specifically, in the International Association of Conference Interpreters – AIIC) and in the university-level training of conference interpreters at ESIT in Paris
• Seleskovitch established a doctoral studies programme in ‘traductologie’ (translation studies) at the University of Paris in 1974

Increasing Depth and Breadth

• Interpreting research up until the mid-1990s was largely focused on conference interpreting, and, with few exceptions, on the simultaneous mode
• The ‘intra-social’ dimension of interpreting was hardly noticed by the international interpreting research community until the milestone event in 1995, The Critical Link: Interpreters in the Community
• The Critical Link conferences have provided a worldwide forum for practitioners and researchers to address profession-related concerns, such as training, standards of practice and codes of ethics, as well as conceptual issues of interpreter-mediated communication that arise in particular in face-to-face settings

Unity in Diversity

• Interpreting studies in the early twenty-first century presents itself as a thriving and increasingly diverse discipline, in which a set of largely complementary research approaches are brought to bear on a highly multidimensional object of study
• There is dialogue interpreting in the international sphere (as in high-level diplomatic interpreting) just as there can be community-based conferences in which interpreters (e.g. signed-language interpreters) are at work

Memes and Models

• Interpreting research has followed a variety of different pathways, shaped by tradition as well as by the demands of newly emerging phenomena and scientific viewpoints
• Five paradigms of interpreting research can be identified:
  1. The classic paradigm of the Paris School, based on its interpretive theory (IT paradigm)
  2. The (often experimental) study of interpreter’s cognitive processing (CP paradigm)
  3. The highly interdisciplinary approach relying on neuropsychological experiments and neuro-imaging techniques to investigate the neurolinguistics of interpreting (NL paradigm)
  4. The view of interpreting from target-text-oriented translation theory (TT paradigm)
  5. The study of interpreting as discourse-based interaction (DI paradigm)

Major Issues

• Cognitive Processing:
  • Drawing on insights and methods from such fields as cognitive psychology, psycholinguistics and cognitive pragmatics
  • Research has explored both the cognitive substrate (i.e. memory) and the various strategies employed in processing verbal messages and their paralinguistic and non-verbal components
• Quality:
  • Producing an interpretation that fulfils the communicative needs and expectations of the intended addressee is the interpreter’s primary task – and the principal standard for measuring the quality of an interpreter’s product and performance
  • Quality implies not (only) equivalence on the linguistic level but an equivalent effect of the interpretation on the listeners
• Training:
  • Fuelled by the growth of international conference interpreting, the demand for professional interpreters led to the creation of university-level training institutions as early as the 1940s
  • The training of conference interpreters, at postgraduate level, has long been consolidated and institutionalized
• Ethics and Role:
  • AIIC adopted a Code of Professional Ethics for conference interpreters as early as 1957, with a ‘Code of Honor’ consisting of five articles, chief among them the principle of professional secrecy
  • The RID Code of Ethics, dating back to 1965, went considerably further by addressing such principles as impartiality and faithfulness
• Technology:
  • A major impact on the interpreting profession has always come from technological developments
  • The spread of remote interpreting, that is, a situation in which the interpreter is not in the same location as the communicating parties, has been of particular significance in healthcare and judicial settings as well as in the domain of signed-language interpreting

This quiz explores the development and current state of interpreting studies, including its sources and influences from psychology and other disciplines. It covers the unique demands of simultaneous listening and speaking in interpreting.